An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Jack Kerouac—The Beat Still Goes On

Neal
Cassady and Jack Kerouac a/k/a Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise.

In 1957 Viking
Press published a book that may be one of the most significant American cultural artifacts of the 20th Century—On the Road by Jack Kerouac.It has been compared to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—a fresh look at America though entirely
self-conscious eyes and presented in a revolutionary literary form.It was hailed as “the Bible of the Beat
Generation.”Truman Capote haughtily dismissed it—“That's not writing, that's
typing.”

Jack Kerouac was born to French Canadian parents in the old mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12,
1922.The working class family spoke Joual, a rough dialect of
Québécois Creole, at home and Ti Jean (Little
John), as he was called, spoke no English until he was 6.Later some of Kerouac’s first writing was
done in Joual.

Ti
Jean was very close to his mother, Gabrielle-Ange, a devout Catholic who imbued him in the
faith.Catholicism, particular its
mystical side, would inform Kerouac’s writings even during his most intensely Buddhist period.In his last years, living with and caring for
his ill and aged mother, he returned to regular Catholic observance.

Kerouac first encountered
New York on a trip to the city with
his father Leo in 1935 at the age of
15 which would become the inspirations for his unpublished Joual novella Sur le Chemin (On the road),
later translated as Old bull in the
Bowery.His connection to the city was visceral from the beginning.When his skills as a high school football
player earned him scholarship offers from Boston
College, Notre Dame, and other prestigious schools, he opted for Columbia University because it was in
the city.

Both
his football and academic careers were cut short when he broke his leg freshman
year and when his instinctive resistance to authority brought him into conflict
with his coach, who kept him on the bench.Kerouac dropped out after a year and drifted along, although he took
some classes at the New School.
While living on the West Side he
encountered some of the circle of Bohemians he would make famous Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke,and William S. Burroughs.

In 1942 Kerouac joined
the Merchant Marine and thereafter
often referred to himself as a sailor, although his career was brief.The following year he enlisted in the Navy but went on sick call after little
more than a week and was soon honorably discharged because of disability with a
diagnosis of schizoid personality.

Returning to New York, he
drifted from job to job and settled into a life revolving around his
friends.Chief among them was Lucien Carr, the brilliant and handsome
scion of an influential St. Louis who
introduced him to Ginsberg, Burroughs—another wealthy St. Louis native several
years older than the rest of the group—and others.Kerouac and Carr hoped to ship out to France
together on a freighter and then somehow walk across the war torn country
disguised as a French peasant (Kerouac) and a deaf mute (Carr) to be in Paris when the city was liberated by
the allies.They got as far as spending
one night on a ship before being thrown off of the crew for some reason.

Carr had been stalked for
years by a former teacher and friend of Burroughs, David Kammerer.The
infatuated man quit his job and moved to New York in an attempt to start a
relationship.Carr alternately ignored
him or tolerated his presence on the fringe of their social circle.One night after drinking Kammerer allegedly
assaulted Carr in Central Park after
the younger man again rebuffed his advances.Carr stabbed him to death with his Boy
Scout pocket knife, bound his hands and feet, and threw him in the
river.He went first to Burroughs and
then to Kerouac for help.Kerouac
allegedly helped him dispose of some of the evidence.But Carr eventually turned himself in and
both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses in the
case.After a sensational trial with
lurid suggestions of predatory homosexuality, Carr was found guilty of manslaughter and served two years in
prison.

Kerouac was guilt
stricken and the social circle nearly shattered.He would draw on the experience in two books,
his well-reviewed but little read first novel The Town and the City published
in 1950 and again in the last novel he published before his death, Vanity
of Duluoz.

He and Burroughs began collaboration in 1945 on a novel
entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled
in Their Tanks, which was published for the first time in its entirety
in November 2008.

In 1947 Ginsberg
introduced Kerouac to Neal Cassady,
a charismatic drifter and ex-con from California.That same year the two set out on the
adventures that Kerouac would chronicle in On
the Road.

The book is thinly
disguised autobiography.The original
manuscript, the legendary scroll—120
feet of thin tracing paper taped together and fed through Kerouac’s portable
manual typewriter as he wrote in a frenzy of creativity in a few weeks of April
1951—contained the real names of the characters and a lot of detail—much of it
sexual, that was left out of the published version for fear of obscenity
laws.The book described the bohemian circle of friends he had in New York, especially young Alan Ginsberg, encountering the
outlaw/saint/hero with whom he embarked on a series of cross country trips,
separating and reuniting at intervals as the writer becomes increasingly
alienated from the free spirited wander.The trips began in 1947 and continued to early 1950.All the while Kerouac kept a series of
detailed notebooks on which based the manuscript.

Over the next six years
Kerouac revised the text of the scroll substantially, including changing the
names of the characters transforming a memoir into a novel.He became Sal Paradise, Cassady Dean Moriarty, and Ginsberg Carlo Marx.So although the original manuscript reflected
Kerouac’s passion for “spontaneous writing,” it had roots in the notebooks,
from which large passages were lifted nearly intact, and was subject to considerable
revision and editing.

Kerouac’s first novel had
been influenced by another stream of
consciousness writer with a penchant for vivid descriptive passages—Thomas Wolfe and was a sprawling
multi-generational epic.On the Road was a major departure.Kerouac consciously drew on the phrasing,
rhythms, and riffing of bebop jazz for
stylistic inspiration.

Publishers were confused
and put off.Kerouac struggled for six
years to find publisher, re-editing his manuscript several times before Viking
picked it up, scrubbed of much of the rawest sexual content.

When released, the book
created a sensation—and sensational reviews.The New York Times Was almost over the top in effusive praise,
“its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an
authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention
is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of
fashion.”Most other reviews were
equally enthusiastic, although the book found conservative critics for its
portrayal of sex, drug use, and sympathetic treatment of Reds and minorities.

And it gave a name to a
restless, rebellious generation—The Beat
Generation.As much as chronicling
them, it created them as the young of artistic bent across the country strove
to become Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, and
friends.It continues to influence
generations of writers, poets, musicians, artists of all kinds, and dreamy
misfits.

Kerouac was uncomfortable
with his new fame, although it created a market for some of his unpublished
manuscripts including Visions of Cody, Dr.
Sax, Maggie Cassidy, The
Subterraneans, Tristessa, and eventually Visions
of Gerard created as he spent the next several years wandering America
and Mexico.

In California he came
under the influence of the mystic nature poet Gary Snyder, with whom he lived and studied Buddhism, and which he recounted in Dharma Bums, his
second most famous novel.He continued
to drink heavily, use drugs, and have intense failed relationships with
women—he married three times but said his mother was the only woman he truly
loved.He would settle for a time in
places from rural Minnesota to Orlando, Florida, to North Port, New
York to write.There were frequent
extended visits with friends in the Beat scenes inNew York and San Francisco.

After
1958 he lived mainly with his third wife, Stella Sampas and his ailing mother,
who influenced his return to Catholicism.His later works include Lonesome
Traveler, Big Sur, and Vanity
of Duluoz.

Unlike his friends Ginsburg, Burroughs, Snyder, Gregory
Corso, and Cassady, who became an icon to a new generation as the driver of
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters bus Further in Tom
Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, Kerouac did not embrace the counter-culture of
the Sixties who looked to him as
inspiration.Always more politically
conservative that Ginsberg, who he dubbed Carlo Marx in On the Road, he became more so late in life.He even became uncomfortable being identified
with the Beat Generation he had named.“I’m not a beatnik,” he
declared, “I’m a Catholic.”

Kerouac died on October
21, 1969 at the age of 47 of internal bleeding caused by advanced cirrhosis of the liver.He was living in St. Petersburg, Florida at the time with his wife and mother.He was buried near his father back in Lowell,
Massachusetts.